else. and you wanted a bit of that to bring back to smokey, smoggy old london. and as a souvenir, a very grand souvenir, mounted often in gold. well, the miracle of these objects is that they're not made of stone but they're actually made of glass, and glass is an extraordinary material. when it's viscous, you can stretch it and stretch it and stretch it rather like sort of toffee or something like that and then snap it and make tiny, tiny little tesserae, which are a reference to hard stone mosaics, but actually in this case they're made of glass. it may have helped them to achieve this dazzling effect because they could choose the colors, and they could get the grading of the size correct to the subject matter. but they could also heat the tiny tesserae in a furnace and to a sort of viscosity, i think is the right word. that's a good word that, isn't it? viscosity. and then they fused together. when they cool, they sort of grip one another with an atomic bond within the glass. and so they're pretty durable. here are some sort of bucolic scenes, aren't t
